Masters Of War

Come you masters of war You that build all the guns You that build the death planes You that build all the bombs You that hide behind walls You that hide behind desks I just want you to know I can see through your masks. You that never done nothin' But build to destroy You play with my world Like it's your little toy You put a gun in my hand And you hide from my eyes And you turn and run farther When the fast bullets fly. Like Judas of old You lie and deceive A world war can be won You want me to believe But I see through your eyes And I see through your brain Like I see through the water That runs down my drain. You fasten all the triggers For the others to fire Then you set back and watch When the death count gets higher You hide in your mansion' As young people's blood Flows out of their bodies And is buried in the mud. You've thrown the worst fear That can ever be hurled Fear to bring children Into the world For threatening my baby Unborn and unnamed You ain't worth the blood That runs in your veins. How much do I know To talk out of turn You might say that I'm young You might say I'm unlearned But there's one thing I know Though I'm younger than you That even Jesus would never Forgive what you do. Let me ask you one question Is your money that good Will it buy you forgiveness Do you think that it could I think you will find When your death takes its toll All the money you made Will never buy back your soul. And I hope that you die And your death'll come soon I will follow your casket In the pale afternoon And I'll watch while you're lowered Down to your deathbed And I'll stand over your grave 'Til I'm sure that you're dead.------- Bob Dylan 1963

Right now in Hillary’s camp, they’re going through tortuous spin doctoring – with advisors like Larry “repeal Glass-Steagall” Summers exerting huge influence. How and why this guy or anyone like him has any clout is a mystery – unless, of course, your real intentions are to continue to treat Wall Street as your patron. And Hillary is doing everything she can to avoid answering that question. She consistently tries to keep us from knowing who she is and what she stands for. She campaigns by “listening” and speaks only after developing a spinned up version of her “positions” designed primarily to give her flexibility to do whatever the hell she wants to do.READ MORE

the Wikileaks page to access the document is here, and the purpose of the chapter they released is to establish the means by which a multinational corporation can get compensation from a signatory government if one of that government's laws interferes with the corporation's profits...it sets up a supra-national court under the World Trade Organization's Dispute Settlement Body, whereby foreign firms can sue governments and obtain taxpayer compensation for whatever "expected future profits" that the government's law encumbered...the adjudication of these disputes would not be by elected officials of any of the signatory governments, but by a tribunal of international trade attorneys representing the multinational corporations....in effect, this trade agreement, and the similar trade agreement that we are negotiating with Europe, gives these world trade tribunals trump power over federal, state or local financial and environmental regulations, patent law, labor laws and worker safety rules, public health, anti-smoking legislation and drug laws, or any law that could be construed as interfering with corporate profits...

in the week just ended, the count of rigs drilling for oil in the US fell by 12 to 813, while the number of active gas rigs fell by 9 to 233...with two miscellaneous rigs still active, that left the rig count as reported by Baker Hughes at 1046, down 21 from the week of March 20th and representing the least number of rigs shut down in any week since the week of December 5th...of those that were idled this week, 17 were engaged in horizontal drilling and 4 were vertical drilling rigs; over the past year, American drillers have stacked 761 rigs, and they're now operating 829 horizontal rigs, 399 less than a year ago, 148 vertical rigs, 240 less than a year ago, and 92 directional rigs, 122 less than the same week last year ...this week's shutdowns were widespread; of the major basins, only the Niobrara Chalk, which stretches over 5 states under the Rockies front range, saw as many as 3 rigs idled, while of the states, Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Alaska each saw 3 rigs idled, while Pennsylvania and Kansas both added a rig...north of the border, Canadian drillers shut down another 20 rigs, leaving them with just 120 rigs active..that's down from the 300 rigs they were running just 3 weeks ago...this week they idled another 12 oil rigs, leaving them with just 18, while they shut down 8 of the 110 gas rigs they ran last week, leaving 102...

Sunday, March 29, 2015

In 1969, the Black Panther Party (BPP) established a relationship with the North Korean leadership that was based upon the principle of self-reliance (under the rubric of the Juche ideology), the transnational goal of Third World revolution, and a mutual antagonism toward American intervention around the world. Although the U.S. government forbade its citizens from travelling to North Korea, BPP leader Eldridge Cleaver along with other Panthers bypassed travel restrictions and visited North Korea to join anti-imperialist journalist conferences in 1969 and 1970. In North Korea, officially known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), the Panthers found a new ideology and a government that was critical of the U.S. government. The Panthers established an alliance with North Korean leaders who they recognized as an independent force within the world communist movement. They believed that the “Black colony” inside the United States could learn from the DPRK’s self-reliant stance in political, economic, and cultural matters. This study adds to recent scholarship on the global influence of the BPP and opens a new field of inquiry, as the BPP-North Korean relationship has not been analyzed in-depth.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton advised a House Select Committee on Friday that she permanently deleted all emails from the private server she used to conduct official business, apparently after she was first asked by the State Department to turn them over, the panel’s chairman said Friday.

In response to a congressional subpoena, Clinton also said she would not allow an independent third party to analyze the server.

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

One top-secret 2008 document features an interview with the NSA’s Global Capabilities Manager for Countering Foreign Intelligence, entitled “Which Foreign Intelligence Service Is the Biggest Threat to the US?” He repeatedly names Israel as one of the key threats.

While noting that Russia and China do the most effective spying on U.S., he says that “Israel also targets us.” He explains that “A NIE [National Intelligence Estimate] ranked [Israel] as the third most aggressive intelligence service against the US.” While praising the surveillance relationship with Israel as highly valuable, he added: “One of NSA’s biggest threats is actually from friendly intelligence services, like Israel.” Specifically, the Israelis “target us to learn our positions on Middle East problems.”

even North Dakota, which usually has a major oil spill or two hit the wires each week, seems to have escaped the week relatively unscathed, with just two brine spills of under 500 barrels each...in the first spill, a pipeline owned by Continental Resources leaked nearly 19,000 gallons of brine after it was struck by excavating equipment about 16 miles north of Tioga, a fairly remote location in northwest N. Dakota...the brine, which is several times saltier than seawater, was said to be contained on the site and did not threaten any waterways or wildlife...the second spill occurred at the site of a wastewater injection well in Bottineau County, about six miles north of Maxbass, when a piping connection failure resulted in a spill of 11,970 gallons of saltwater, which was also contained on the site...

now, just because we didn't hear of any other spills doesn't mean there weren't any...for instance, we rarely hear of any spills in Texas, where nearly half the US wells are located, likely because it goes with the territory in a state where the industry owns the regulators and is hence protected...in Colorado, where they have strict reporting and remediation rules written into law, the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission requires a written report within 24 hours of any spill greater than 5 barrels, and of any spill off site greater than 1 barrel...hence, in their Oil and Gas spill report of March 16, they reported 8 spills that occurred in between March 4th and March 12, most of them minor, with the largest being of 18 barrels of produced oil that leaked when a valve was left open at the back of a production tank at a well outside of Greeley...with requirements for such reporting being enforced, we know that more than 700 oil and gas spills occurred in Colorado in 2014, a total we can only guess at for other states...

let's be clear; if there's one policy change that will bring fracking back with a vengeance, it would be to allow domestic drillers to sell their crude overseas...over the past 5 years, WTI (West Texas Intermediate), the US benchmark price for crude oil, has generally been trading for about $10 a barrel less than the price of Brent oil, the similar international oil benchmark price...if we allow exports, that price gap will close, most likely to the upside, because it's been the domestic glut of oil that has been holding US oil prices lower...so in addition to tearing up more of our countryside with the kind of industrial activities we've seen are associated with fracking, we'll be seeing even more oil and brine spills, more oil bomb trains crisscrossing the country, more injection well and fracking induced earthquakes, and higher prices for all the oil based products most of us still buy, all so that the oil companies can extract a few more bucks of profit out of each barrel...and this applies not just to the current push in Congress to allow for exports of US crude, but it also applies to the two trade agreements being negotiated in secret by the administration at the behest of 600 multinational corporations...if Obama gets trade promotion authority (TPA) from Congress, also known as "fast track", which the Republicans tend to support, these two trade deals, which would mandate oil and gas exports to Asia and Europe in the same way that NAFTA clears them for Mexico and Canada, can be passed without a public hearing or debate, on a simple majority yes or no vote of Congress...even worse, draining America first will leave us vulnerable to higher prices and the whims of international oil producers in the future, after our fracking boom runs its course; in the most recent forecast from the Energy Department, US oil production is expected to peak in 2020 and gradually decline from there...meanwhile, they also project the average price for oil to rise to $234.53 a barrel by 2040...so if we let the oil companies drain our oil basins to sell that oil at $50 to $60 a barrel now, we'll be paying them 4 to 5 times as much to import whatever oil we still need 25 years into the future...

oil field activity continued to slow, however, as the number of US rigs drilling for oil this week fell by 41 to 825, and the count of rigs drilling for natural gas fell by 15 to 242; this leaves 648 less oil rigs operating than a year ago, and 48 less gas rigs than the same week in 2014 ...the Baker Hughes weekly rig summary also showed that of the 1069 rigs operating as of March 20th, 829 were engaged in horizontal drilling, down 20 from the prior week, 148 were drilling straight down, 18 less than the prior week, and 92 were engaged in directional drilling, again a drop of 18 rigs from the week of March 13th count...and in an oddity, 11 of the 46 Gulf of Mexico platforms that were working last week and 6 of the 8 rigs drilling on inland lakes were shut down; in prior weeks, most of the closures had been land based...nonetheless, this week also saw 39 fewer land based rigs operating, with just 1030 operating as of March 20th...once again, the Permian Basin in west Texas saw the greatest decrease in activity, with 19 rigs taken out of service there; combined with losses of 8 rigs in the Eagle Ford and more elsewhere, that left Texas with 465 active rigs, 36 fewer than last week...with the Gulf shutdowns, Louisiana's rig count fell by 18 to 75; in addition, New Mexico's count dropped by 5, while North Dakota and Ohio both saw 3 rigs shut down...Ohio now has 28 rigs operating, down from 35 two weeks ago...

The last days of the campaign sounded an awful lot like the Jim Crow South, when African Americans had officially won the right to vote but still faced massive discrimination.

On election morning, a powerful white official running for re-election urged his followers to get out and vote, warning that minority voters were turning out in large numbers — and those trouble-making civil rights agitators, he complained, were busing them to the polls.

But this wasn’t Mississippi or Alabama circa 1965. It was Israel in 2015.

And the candidate wasn’t some protégé of Bull Connor or George Wallace shouting into a bullhorn. It was Israel’s prime minister writing on his Facebook page.

Naked Racism

The leader of Washington’s closest Middle East ally — the storied “only democracy in the Middle East” — was pushing his right-wing supporters to get out and vote. “The right-wing government is in danger,” he warned, because — in his words — “Arab voters are coming out in droves to the polls. Left-wing organizations are busing them out.”

The naked racism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s last-minute electioneering was repellent. But more horrifying was the fact that it worked.

The language aimed to frighten right-wing Israeli Jewish voters with the specter of a large turnout among the Palestinians who make up 20 percent of Israeli citizens. The gambit brought back to Netanyahu’s Likud Party the far-right voters who otherwise might have voted for one of the even more extreme right-wing parties.

It worked. Likud trumped its challengers from the right as well as the left, and Netanyahu swept to victory.

“A man who goes forth to take the life of another whom he does not know must believe one thing only – that by his act he will change the course of history.” Thus Itzhak Shamir, a future prime minister of Israel, explained the strategy of assassination that the Freedom Fighters for Israel – known to Jews by its Hebrew acronym, Lehi, and to the British, as the Stern Gang – embraced in the 1940s.

Compared to contemporary terrorist groups, Lehi was unique. Its targets were not innocent civilians and its weapon of choice was not the bomb that maimed and killed indiscriminately but the handgun pointed at the chest of the colonial officials and police officers charged with governing Palestine under the League of Nations mandate awarded to Britain after World War I. So precious were the group’s few weapons and so profound its members’ belief in the power of individual assassination that the same pistol was used in six high-profile shootings during an especially febrile eighteen-month period.

It was last, and most consequentially, used on November 6, 1944 to assassinate Lord Moyne, the British Cabinet minister responsible for the Middle East during World War II. The murder, which Shamir had ordered, did change the course of history – but not for the better. Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s daring plan to resolve Arab and Jewish claims to Palestine by partitioning the country into separate states was abandoned with the killing of his life-long friend and political ally. And, three years later the first of many wars would be fought between Arab and Jew over that land’s political future.

- See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/158819#sthash.4HCYZebD.dpuf

Thursday, March 19, 2015

Competition between the world's two greatest economic powers is both inevitable and (for the most part) beneficial. This is the case even when China and the U.S. are arguing over control of increasingly obsolescentinternational financial institutions.

China's effort to start the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank grows more popular by the day, despite U.S. resistance to the idea. The question is no longer whether the bank will fulfill an unmet need, but how best to ensure that it contributes to Asian growth -- and, not incidentally, draws China more deeply into the global financial order.

'Runnin' N--ger Target' Sold at North Dakota Gun Show - The Root: “You know there are some black people, and then there are some Negroes,” the vendor, who seems to fancy himself an expert in Negro-ology, argued. The vendor then went on to tell the photographer that he sold about 500 of the targets at the gun show over the weekend.

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) meets with former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, March 17, 2015. [Photo: Xinhua/Wang Ye]

President Xi Jinping on Tuesday called for more strategic trust and reciprocal cooperation between China and the United States.

Xi made the remarks as he met with former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger at the Great Hall of the People in downtown Beijing. Xi praised the veteran diplomat as an "ice-breaker" for China-U.S. diplomacy in the 1970s and for his continuous contributions to the relationship over the past decades.

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